December 19, 2003

Child's Play: Grade-School Grandmasters Square Off

By ROBERT ANDREW POWELL

At the National Scholastic K-12/Collegiate Chess Championships, players who can barely tie their shoelaces are castling and double pawning.

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Contenders concentrate on the game.

ROSEMONT, Ill.

CHRISTOPHER HEUNG arrives a marked boy. Not that he seems aware of it. As he nibbles on the oversize chocolate chip cookie he has started his dinner with, he exhibits no concern about defending his back-to-back national chess championships.

Auburn crumbs accumulate on his black turtleneck. His legs dangle over the edge of his chair, his feet not yet able to reach the carpet. Christopher won the National Scholastic K-12/Collegiate championship as a first grader and again last year as a second grader. Now, having come to this suburban satellite of Chicago's O'Hare airport this past weekend to play for the third-grade title, Christopher arrives as the top-ranked 8-year-old chess player in America.

Does he have a strategy for the tournament? No, he responds with a giggle, his rising cheeks lifting his round glasses and curving his eyes into crescents. Questions about expectations and nerves are brushed off with more laughter. When the name of his main rival, Ray Robson, is raised, Christopher blithely leaps from his seat in search of watermelon from the hotel restaurant's buffet.

"I'm worried but he's not," says his mother, Rita Heung, twirling a tight ball of spaghetti onto a fork. "At this age level the kids don't feel the pressure, they're just playing. The parents, they feel it."

Mrs. Heung is one of thousands of parents devoting their weekends to their children's emerging interests. "Children take over your life," said Steven Finney, a chess father here with his son, Stuart. The demands increase when the talent emerges. Stuart Finney is a forward on his soccer team and can play Haydn on the piano with his eyes closed. But those avocations have been eclipsed by chess, a game in which he shows such aptitude — Stuart is currently the fifth-ranked 8-year-old in America — that his father feels a responsibility to shepherd him to tournaments every month, take him to chess club on other weekends, buy him more than 30 chess primers, and pay $50 an hour for weekly chess lessons.

All over the United States, in places best known for baseball and soccer, the newest state champs aren't guzzling Gatorade and tying cleats. They are hunched over tables in hotels and convention centers, concentrating intently as they compete for trophies. Many of the contestants are kindergartners. They can barely tie their shoes, but they know how to score with sophisticated moves like castling and double pawning.

This year's scholastic chess national championships, where young players compete at grade level, held last Friday through Sunday at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare, attracted close to 2,000 entrants, most of them young boys. Tournament organizers were hoping for another thousand participants, but the weak economy has narrowed the pool of parents willing to pay for hotel rooms, meals and airfare, not to mention tournament entrance fees. Mrs. Heung, a stay-at-home mother married to a civil engineer, feels the expense is justified by her son's ability.

"It's a sacrifice," she said, estimating she spends about $10,000 a year on chess for her son, a sum that the family struggles to afford. "But he loves to play, he's so good at it, and someday he'll be able to look back and tell his grandchildren he was the best chess player in the country."

To continue as national champion, Christopher, from Boca Raton, Fla., will have to get past Ray Robson, a 9-year-old third grader, also from Florida. Chess ratings are roughly similar to golf handicaps. Ray's rating of 1795 is more than 200 points higher than Christopher's, a significant gap.

At last year's championships in Atlanta, luck of the draw kept the two boys from playing each other, allowing Christopher to slip past Ray in the final round. On the drive home from Atlanta, Ray and his father resolved to defeat Christopher at this year's tournament. Ray has read one book by a chess master every day for the last year. He's sharpened his skills in countless tournaments against tough adult competition.

While Ray's rating has climbed high enough to induce apnea, Christopher's rating is also surging. Just one weekend before the nationals, Christopher won the Palm Beach County District scholastic championship.

"I've seen games where he's dropped his rook in, like, six moves," Christopher says of Ray between bites of melon. "So it's not like he's invincible or anything like that. He makes mistakes."

THE tournament opens just after lunch on Friday. Boys from kindergarten through college cruise the lobby in heavy parkas, rolled-up vinyl chess boards poking out of their backpacks. Chess dads sit with their sons
at tables along the side of the towering
hotel atrium, tapping timekeepers and talking over their openings and endgames. Downstairs, a grandmaster from Russia plays out an exhibition, besting 50 contestants at once.

At 1 p.m. everyone parades through a maze of skywalks to the convention center next door, where the games are to be played. Twenty-five rows of folding conference tables are covered in teal and gray cloths, with more than 1,000 vinyl boards and the appropriate number of plastic pieces set up, 14 boards to a table. Players sit shoulder to shoulder at tables arranged by grade. Ray Robson heads the third-grade table, at the first board. Christopher, next to Ray on Board 2, draws an opponent from Colorado with a rating an enormous 600 points below his.

Parents spill around the room, sitting on the cold concrete floor and reading "The Da Vinci Code" while guarding colorful plastic knapsacks. The Florida contingent gathers in a pack within eyesight of its sons. Although New York City remains the epicenter of chess in America, players from Florida are increasingly successful at the scholastic level. The theme parks of Orlando are frequently hosts to tournaments, regularly exposing players to quality competition within driving distance.

When play starts, a hush falls over the room. Parental chitchat is muted by the cavernous space. The dominant sound is the whir of fans and the soft slap of sneakers on concrete as boys speedwalk to the restrooms. Only players are allowed in the bathrooms, lest a parent pass along advice. At one recent tournament in Florida, a player who claimed an active bladder was actually meeting with his coach, who was suggesting moves.

Christopher periodically rises to his knees to get an overhead view of the board, a tip he picked up from his chess coach. Between turns he looks around the room absently, smiling at his mother or checking out the play on Ray's board.

Tournament directors in red vests control the floor, pushing back curious parents. If a child raises his hand, the director will walk over to confirm the win or to examine an alleged illegal move. At the younger levels, the most stubborn children sometimes argue that they haven't lost when they clearly have.

Christopher wins easily. In the second round, held only a couple of hours after the first game ended, he crushes a high-rated opponent from Massachusetts. Ray wins, too. Christopher joins a contest of tag that has broken out near his mother. He requests Chicago-style deep-dish pizza for dinner and asks if it's O.K. now to play Pokémon on his Game Boy.

"He still runs around, and I like to see it," Mrs. Heung says as she tracks Christopher's whereabouts. "Playing chess they concentrate so hard, but when they hand in all their scores, I like to see them run around. I know they're still kids."

THREE games are scheduled for Saturday. The first one starts at 10 a.m. When the games begin, the parents of older players retreat to the hotel pool and gym, relieved that a cellphone is all the supervision their children need. In a makeshift chess marketplace, vendors sell software tutorials, along with timers, boards and commemorative T-shirts. A novelty chess set features plastic Coca-Cola bottles for pawns. Another set is a Subway Series between the Mets and the Yankees.

Joan DuBois is at the cash register. She is one of the six directors of the U.S. Chess Federation, an organization she has been with for more than three decades, and which she has seen grown to about 90,000 members, half under the age of 19. "Fifteen to 20 years ago, we had maybe 60,000 members, of which maybe 5,000 were kids," she said. "I mean, they have taken over our membership."

By the second game of the day, parental fatigue sets in. The tournament's tight schedule leaves no time to explore the Chicago Art Institute or the Field Museum or even to go Christmas shopping. Repeated meals at the same hotel restaurant lose their appeal fast.

"You don't enjoy a weekend like this," Mrs. Heung offers, standing outside the hall as her son plays a boy from Orlando. "It's just what you have to do. If he weren't so good I wouldn't be here. But he is good and so I am here."

Christopher has always liked to play games. He happily passes afternoons clicking his mouse while he plays Risk on a computer. When his father, Wing Heung, introduced him to chess four years ago, Christopher jettisoned interests in tennis, soccer and swimming to concentrate on improving his game. To pay for travel and tournaments, the Heungs cut back on other expenses. Their small house has almost no furniture to obscure the cache of Christopher's trophies. To save money, Mrs. Heung took a taxi to the hotel from the airport instead of renting a car. The costs are something Mrs. Heung feels she has no choice but to bear.

"The first year, we were debating whether or not to go to nationals," she recalled. "It's his birthday in January. He told us he'd give up his birthday presents and his Christmas presents to play in the tournament. We had to respond to that kind of interest."

Christopher and Ray both win again. Stuart Finney, a classmate of Christopher's at Water's Edge Elementary in Boca Raton, lost to Hugo Kitano, a Californian. As he leaves the hall, Stuart reaches up for his father's hand, saying nothing until he's halfway back to the hotel. Once in the room, Stuart calls his mother, crying as he tells her what happened. When Stuart hangs up, his father plays around on the bed with him for half an hour, enough time to remove the sting from the loss.

ON Sunday morning contestants huddle around a bulletin board at the tournament hall, waiting to see whom they will face. A high-pitched cheer rises when an official pins the pairings to the board. What had long been anticipated is now reality: Christopher and Ray are playing each other on Board 1.

Before taking his plastic chair, Christopher affirms his fearlessness.

"Almost every kid works hard at it out here," he says. "They know their parents are using a plane ticket to take them all this way. But when I play I don't feel pressure. Maybe every once in a while if I'm unsure of a move I might feel a little bit, but not like trembling all over or anything."

After the first round, parents are barred from the hall for the first 30 minutes of every game. As in any youth activity, parents can be a distracting presence. Some players respond to parental stress by vomiting on their chess pieces. At a recent tournament, a kindergartner facing defeat offered his opponent $3 for a draw.

The parents gather behind a blue curtain near the doors to the hall. Many of them find the waiting so stressful they can't read the novels they hold in their hands. Mothers and fathers glance at every child who walks out of the hall to see if it's theirs. Some children cry. Others bounce with delight.

"A full day of waiting leaves me more tired than running a marathon, and I've done both," said Barbara Silberman of Miami, the mother of an 8-year-old named Sam. After 30 minutes, the parents are let back into the hall, but only as far as a line of barricades that keep them out of earshot of their children, frustrating attempts to analyze attacks and defenses.

From the opening, Ray is a rock. He stares at the board, grinding through options. Systematically, he considers every opportunity, extrapolating his choices 15 to 20 moves into the future. It can take him a precious 40 minutes to make up his mind — players are allotted only 90 minutes apiece for the entire game — but once he's decided, the game often plays out quickly.

Between moves, Ray takes bathroom breaks, his eyes on his feet, his mind clearly on the game. Christopher paces the rows, checking out other games and glancing around for his mother, who, allowed now back in the hall, remains hidden in a corner far from the board. The separation is nerve-racking, but necessary. "You want to tell him to move, move, you're low on time!" she says. "You find yourself questioning his choices, and sometimes your facial expression disturbs him. It's better I stay over here."

At close to two hours in, most of the contestants have returned to the hotel for brunch or a splash in the pool. Suddenly Ray stands, a dominant position that signals to his father and Mrs. Heung that victory is imminent. A minute later his hand shoots up. Christopher's hand does not. After an official walks over to certify the result, Ray goes to hug his parents, who are already celebrating the win by hugging each other. He flashes a smile that reveals a missing tooth. "We worked hard for this," his father, Gary Robson, says, tears welling in his eyes. "I just get so excited seeing someone I love and am proud of doing so well. I can't think of a better way to spend a weekend."

Ray is asked how it feels to win a national championship for the first time. "I don't know," he says in a voice so high and soft it's almost a chirp. "It feels good? It feels good."

Across the hall, Mrs. Heung wraps Christopher in a hug. He is silent and his head is down, his string of national titles broken. Yet by the time he leaves the hall the game seems out of his mind. On the march back to the hotel he repeatedly tosses his sweatshirt in the air.

When he looks out a window and sees a dusting of white on the ground, he reminds his mother of her promise to let him play outside when the tournament is over. For an 8-year-old from Florida, a national championship is secondary to a chance to play in the snow.